November 1st at 1pm I will be running a Midgard demo game at Michigan Toy Soldier. This will give me a chance to field some of the Medieval minis I spent the summer painting and will offer the opportunity for new players to give Midgard a try before taking the plunge.
Just some formal shots before handing over to my buddy Steve. The model looks so much better without the workbench clutter. Therer were compromises (of course) in reducing this to a manageable size; a pair of six-inch guns went missing as well as about one-third of each of the foredeck, midships and stern. I tried to maintain the overall look of the vessel.
As a project gets close to completion I like to go over the model and make sure that the little details are all squared away and any painting issues are touched up. I check the sub-assemblies and small details before permanently installing them. It is far easier to correct problems beforehand that to try to guide a paint-laden brush past a load of details to fix a paint flaw.
Now that all of the bulky item have been sorted out I move on to the fiddly stuff. These will get progressively tedious as I move forward but they are the thing that make the model "pop" so they cannot be overlooked. Rivets (of course) are everywhere, railings were nearly as ubiquitous but the guns shields were present for only part of the ship's life so they have to be removable (I think the ship looks better without them but YMMV).
It didn't take long for applying a zillion rivets to turn into a trudge so I decided to turn my had to fabricating the last two gun positions. These mounted 47mm "anti-torpedoe-boat quick firing guns" and were mounted amidships with a protruding casement to allow for a wide field of fire. These guns had more range and hitting power than the Gatling guns albeit at a slower rate of fire. The task was simple enough as the casements were simple half-cylinders. NOt finding enough difficulty in those I decided to have a go at scratchbuilding the gatling guns. This was a much more engaging task.
Not terribly exciting but essential. I make rivets using puffy T-shirt paint. This is tedious and slow but rivets are the thing that held ships together, Millions, if not billions, of rivets. Each one heated red-hot and then pounded through the metal and hammered flat to hold the steel sheets together. My method requires far less work and no working with red-hot metal.
Things are moving on apace. Having finished the main guns I moved on to the secondary and tertiary gun positions. The Atlanta is an unusual ship with an odd layout in many ways, the secondary guns are in a battery firing through gun-ports much in the manner of wooden ships of the line. The tertiary guns are in peculiar little towers positions at the corners of the superstructure. These battery positions were closed with shutters that folded outward to allow the guns to rotate and bear on targets.
Not having much time today I stuck with beginning the upper works and the main guns. I detailed the con and began the process of making cylinders for the Gatling turrets and the funnels. The forest of ventilators will have to wait until I can make a trip to Hobby Lobby to get some supplies.
The first step was to gather as many images as possible (OK, as many images as possible after a ten minute search on the internet). Ships are complicated things with often lengthy life-spans so getting a decent grasp on the changes is important. The Atlanta was subject to many changes but the most significant was the addition of shields to the main guns and the reduction in the rigging plan. The vessel also had an unusual hull shape so getting a feel for that was important as well. Once I had a decent understanding of things it was time to get out my old friend Proxxie and to start cutting foam,
The protected cruiser Atlanta that is! Recently a friend of mine asked if I would build him a model of the USS Atlanta to go with the model of the USS Kearsarge that I had made for him a while ago. It has been quite a while since I built one of my per-dreadnought boats so it was easy to agree. He asked that it be in the same style (Impressionistic rather than an exact scale model) as the Kearsarge model. A quick image search provided the drawing you see below. Of particular interest are the staggered turrets for the main weapons and the open mounts for the same. This was certainly an unusual looking ship!
Of course I leapt at the idea, more to follow
Having finished the Fireforge knights I decided to get them organized and sorted out to be placed into storage boxes. It was then that I realized that I might (just maybe) have gone a bit to far into the deep end of the pond. Fourteen stands of knights exceeds by a considerable margin any reasonable requirements for a Midgard army, even if I down-rate some of them to sergeants. The only comfort is that I can easily field enough forces for two complete armies. Be that as it may, I now have all of them painted and based and can tick that box off the list.
